The most basic functionality of accessing a webserver is presenting text. Yes, you can add pictures and other things but the basic medium for this system is text. You need to become familiar with the way things are structured before you can start working with dynamic content. This is not going to be a primer on creating HTML. There are many resources for that online. A good starting place would be going to the home of The World Wide Web Consortium. This is where you can find all the information you would ever possibly want to know about about creating HTML.

When you create a document to be viewed by a web browser, you should be careful to remember some things.

Alternative Readers

Not all people are viewing it directly. Visually impared people use different technologies such as text-to-speech, braille readers and such. Be sure to add ALT tags for images so you can tell the viewer what they would see if they saw the pictures.

These pages also have to be read by programs to be able to have them indexed by search engines. That is one of the biggest failings of websites. It doesn't matter how pretty the page is if nobody can find it. Put up some pretty graphic intro page or some beautiful Shockwave/Flash web interface and  the programs that search for content to index from sites like Google and MSN Search (called web crawlers and spiders) cannot interpret the page to add them into their indexes. You end up with beautiful pages that nobody can find.  

Browser Incompatabilites

Theoretically you would be able to create an HTML page to be read by any web browser. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that each browser would interpret the page in exactly the same way. You have to realize that the content from a web page is not a page layout format. If you want it to look exactly the same you should choose a different medium. That is what things like PDF (Portable Document Format) are for.  Just worry about making your content clear and readable and focus on the attributes that are usable by most of the browsers.

Formatting raw html

You should take time to make sure that your text is formatted to be readable without a browser. Proper indention and nesting of levels is important. Even if it is not seen by most viewers, you will occasionally have to go in and look at the raw HTML to see what is happening when you want to make changes. This is one of the biggest problems you face when you use automated HTML generation for creating your HTML. Things like exporting a Microsoft Word document as HTML are fine for an emergency but can be incomprehensable when you go back to try to edit the page directly. Also these HTML generators tend to be focused on specific capabilites of certain browsers and not be very compliant to the standards for HTML.